Re: posix compliance

[Bart Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 20 Jun 2002, Jos Backus wrote:

> A quick report from UseNIX: One thing Jordan Hubbard of Apple mentioned was
> that our positional parameters ($1, $2, etc.) are assignable whereas they are
> not in bash (Chet Ramey, who was also present, confirmed this). The bash
> behavior is apparently what POSIX specifies.

Assignable positional parameters are an intentional feature.  There's no
way they can cause a problem, because a POSIX conforming shell script must
not even attempt it.  (Even in POSIX the positional parameters can be
replaced with the `set' builtin, so claiming that they should be read-only
does not hold water.)

> He also again complained about executable size and footprint (zsh vs.
> bash), which I think was addressed earlier

I don't have an immediate answer to that, although having looked briefly
at the bash2 web site the other day and it's possible that it now has even
more of its "builtins" as loadable modules than zsh does.